zfs question

[Elias Chrysocheris]

On Sunday 08 of August 2010 14:43:48 Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
>   Years back I ran FreeBSD, so I have some experience. The last couple
> of years I ran Solaris, followed by Opensolaris. I am very satisfied.
> However, considering the troubles after Oracle took over I have rebuild
> my server system under FreeBSD-8.1 (now running as a virtual machine
> under VirtualBox). All works very well and smooth so I'm going to
> transfer this VM to a real seperate harddisk.
> 
> I have a couple of questions:
> 
> [1] Transfering the VM is best done using dump/restore I guess? (This
> after a smallest creation of fbsd81 on the new harddisk) ?

That's the way I've done it once. It worked for me, so I believe everything 
will go fine to you, too.

> 
> My server has five disks: 1 PATA (160Gb), 2 SATA2 (500Gb) and 2 SATA2
> (1Tb) The fist is disabled at the moment and the others are ZFS mirrors
> under opensolaris. they are not usable for freebsd because the zfs
> versions don't match. I will have to rebuild. ;-)
> 
> However, I'm a bit worried about the status of ZFS on FreeBSD-8.1 I
> don't want my system to boot off ZFS like I have now on OpenSolaris-b134
> 
> I think it is wisest to have the 160Gb IDE drive installed for FreeBSD
> system drive w/ UFS2 and after that create two ZFS mirrors from my SATA
> drives.
> 
> Is ZFS (v14) ready for production on FreeBSD-8.1 and if yes, will I
> still need special settings? The server system is 64bits and has 3Gb
> memory.
> 
> I hope to get some answers or good reading points.

I have a FreeBSD amd64 machine that is ZFS-only since FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. ZFS 
Pool was in v13 then. It still works fine, even after the update to FreeBSD 
8.1-RELEASE with ZFS Pool v14. I have no problems, even though I pulled the 
plug off by accident (twice...). The system runs fine and the boot partition is 
also in ZFS.

There is no problem if you want to use UFS for the boot partition. I think is 
a matter of taste.

Whatever is your choice I believe that you'll stay happy using ZFS

Best regards
Elias